Great camaraderie helped a crew of wounded servicemen overcome huge odds to
row the Atlantic to Barbados.

Standing on a Barbadian quayside last Wednesday, straw hair poking out from a pink baseball cap, six-year-old Mia Heritage slung her arms around the neck of a grizzled-looking man with a sunburnt face and held on for dear life. After 51 days in a rowing boat, her father, Neil, was finally back on dry land and it was going to take a crowbar to prise the two apart.

“Mia missed me massively, and I missed her. She’s told me I’m never to go away for such a long time again,” he grinned.

Mia can rest easy. Heritage, one of three amputee soldiers who reached Barbados last week after rowing 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, has no intention of going anywhere near the water for several years to come.

Nevertheless, he and his crewmates have joined a select band of great British adventurers – from Sir Robin Knox-Johnston to Sir Chay Blyth – who have tested their mettle (and, in the case of the injured soldiers, their metal) – against the full power of the sea, and survived.

Besides Heritage, 30, who lost both legs in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq in 2004, the Row2Recovery team included Will Dixon, who lost his left leg below the knee in Afghanistan, Rory Mackenzie, a medic whose right leg was blown off by a roadside bomb in Iraq, and Carl Anstey, whose right femur was shattered by a rocket-propelled grenade.

Their achievement moved thousands to tears – not least their friends and family lining the rocks at Port St Charles in Barbados. Emotional relatives jostled with assorted Britons and local dignitaries to get their first view of the conquering heroes. Sir Cliff Richard, who has a house on the island, came down to see these men who had done “the impossible”. The Queen sent a message of congratulations.

But the story of how these men – together with two able-bodied veterans, Ed Janvrin and Alex Mackenzie – made it from La Gomera in the Canary Islands to Port St Charles is far more than a boy’s-own story of adventure on the high seas. It’s a triumph of human resilience and ingenuity, and a testament to the skills and values taught by the British Army.

Twice the crossing came close to failure: first, when they almost ran out of water, and then when their rudder snapped. But, even before those mishaps, the crew were tested by the most extraordinary series of challenges and complications they were powerless to prevent.

“We are all in awe of what they’ve done,” said Greg Symondson, a rival rower in the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, whose team came in 10 days before Row2Recovery. “To attempt that challenge with one or two missing limbs is inconceivable. We had a very hard time, mentally and physically, and it goes without saying that the majority of that crew have had a hell of a tougher time than us.”

Row2Recovery’s problems started with a volcano. As one of 17 teams lined up in La Gomera on December 5 last year, they were told the course had been changed to avoid undersea eruptions off the island of El Hierro.

“That meant travelling on a beam sea for about 60 miles – travelling 90 degrees to the wind – so the waves were hitting us from the side,” Heritage explained when we and the rest of the crew sat down in an old plantation house the day after their arrival on Barbados. “And that meant the deck was constantly submerged in water.”

Heritage hated the first week. He had a custom-made seat and strap that enabled him to get as much power as possible from his upper body. (He didn’t take his “legs” on the crossing and spent the entire trip moving around the boat using his arms.) But, along with other crew members, he suffered badly with sea sickness and sores caused by the salty water. “It’s safe to say I wasn’t enjoying myself,” he said, displaying a soldierly gift for understatement.

The crew – none of whom had had any rowing experience before the team began training last March – were also witnessing the raw power of the elements for the first time. A force-six gale lashed the boat, and 50ft waves, almost twice as high as their vessel was long, came towards them like blocks of flats. Not for nothing is the Talisker Challenge known as the toughest rowing race in the world.

“I hadn’t experienced anything like that,” said Will Dixon, the memory corrugating his brow. “Some of the big waves were OK, because you knew they weren’t going to break, but others were quite steep and looking like they were going to break on you. That’s when you can get a bit twitchy.”

Even Ed Janvrin, the crew’s 32-year-old skipper and a man who’d proved himself countless times during an eight-year career with the Gurkhas, wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the sea’s bombardment. “Some of those waves looked like walls of water coming at you. You could sense that if they were going to break over you, there was a fair chance you would be capsized,” he said.

A capsized boat was every man’s biggest fear. “If the boat re-rights and everyone’s OK, then you can carry on,” Janvrin said. “But if it capsizes and water gets into the cabins, then the boat will stay capsized. And if someone gets hurt at the same time, that’s the nightmare scenario. We got smashed by about half a dozen waves that were so powerful, people were thrown off their seats. Everything was kicked out of its place within the boat. We remained upright by pure luck.”

It’s typical of Janvrin and his men to describe their crossing as lucky. Their instinct was always to “find solutions” and “crack on”. But to any normal person, their experiences were anything but.

Just 24 hours after they’d left La Gomera, amid bad weather and towering waves, the autohelm – the computer system that steered the boat – packed up, damaged beyond repair by the volume of water on deck. The men had to move on to a foot-steering mechanism that was a lot less comfortable. They also sprang a leak in one of the cabins, and two foot plates, which secure the rowers to the deck as they pull on their oars, broke. Repairs had to be done in the dark, on a heaving deck, while most of the men were still fighting pangs of sea sickness.

Eventually, the weather calmed down and the nausea relented. The men fell into a strict regime: while three rowed (often naked to reduce friction burns), the other three crew members would sleep. Then, when they woke up, those who had been rowing went to bed. No one ever slept for more than two-and-a-half hours. On a good day, they covered 70 miles.

The men learnt to dread the “15-minute warning” – notice that your shift was approaching. Janvrin said: “You’d be sleeping, and you’d hear '15 minutes’, and you would groan, 'Oh, God, no. I can’t face it.’ You’d have to get ready and get your kit on. And this happened six times a day.”

It became quite common for the men, in their groggy, semi-conscious state, to imagine they had heard their 15-minute warning. “You’d be rowing at night, and half-way through your shift you’d see a light go on in one of the cabins,” said Janvrin. “Someone would have woken up and started getting ready to row, and you’d have to tell them: 'Go back to bed, mate. You’ve got another hour and a half to sleep.’ ”

To keep their strength up, each man had to consume 4,500 calories a day: 2,500 calories came from freeze-dried meals – mostly curries rehydrated by adding boiling water – with an extra 2,000 from snacks, such as cereal bars, sweets and Peperami meat sticks They also had powdered energy drink mixes – but the choice of what each got to eat could be a source of tension.

“What you had in your pack determined what sort of mood you would be in for the next half an hour,” said Dixon. “And because I was in charge of putting the packs together, if someone thought he’d done badly, I was the one that got it in the neck.”

Without room for the equipment to cook proper meals, at least there was no need to go fishing. When flying fish leapt over the boat, sometimes hitting the rowers in the face, they would be thrown back.

Good relationships on board were crucial to maintaining a happy boat. Alex Mackenzie and Janvrin, who co-founded the project, were old friends and chose the other men partly because they thought their personalities would fit. As they got to know each other before the race, one of their favourite jokes was to sing “Happy Birthday” to Anstey in restaurants, though it was never his birthday, and see if they could persuade other diners to join in. This reached its apogee at their leaving party in La Gomera when the band hauled him on stage, gave him a pair of maracas, and played a dozen versions of the song in different languages. So, on the trip, Anstey was woken up most mornings with: “Happy birthday, Carlos, you’re on shift.”

A constant flow of laddish banter helped them bond – if something went wrong, someone would say: “Don’t worry, worse things happen at sea”. “The relationships we’ve built are really special,” said Janvrin.

His own habit of scavenging for scraps of food – even vacuuming up the crumbs inside the foil food wrappers that others had thrown away – earned him the so briquet “Street Child”. After a photograph of Dixon appeared in a newspaper with the caption “Brave: Will Dixon”, the 27-year-old was known inevitably from then on as “Brave Will Dixon”. The others would start conversations with wisecracks such as: “Will, if you’re feeling brave enough, it’s your time to get on shift.”

At night, most chose to row in silence, plugging in iPods to listen to audiobooks, including biographies of great explorers such as Scott or Shackleton, which helped put their difficulties in perspective. During the day it was more sociable. They would talk about their lives, their hopes and their loved ones.

“We shared a lot,” said Dixon. “You felt you could open up. No big revelations, but honest talk, such as 'I really miss my kids’. We wanted to find out about each other.”

Or they would have long discussions, from philosophy (Dixon and Janvrin once spent three hours debating the existence of “fate”) to new business ideas (such as Dixon’s plan for a chain of butchers). But it was a tough environment. “Most of the time, if you felt down, you wouldn’t dream of showing it,” said Janvrin.

“We are all proud guys, and you didn’t let your feelings show easily. If you were feeling a bit down and expressed it, you’d get ribbed and brought back to reality. If you were too self-pitying, or got angry at someone, everyone would just take the p--- out of you. If you ever complained that you hadn’t had as much food as somebody else, we’d turn on you: 'That’s your problem.’ You had to look after yourself.”

As well as keeping an even mood among the crew, among the three amputees there was also a strict regime of “stump management”, which involved rubbing white spirit into the skin to desensitise it, and regular cleaning with wet wipes to prevent infection. Rory, who was experiencing horrific pain, realised during the trip that five pieces of shrapnel left in his body had worked their way to the surface of his skin. He was forced to pull them out of his behind with the help of forceps, a mirror, and a high dose of painkillers.

But the crew’s worst days were still ahead of them. On December 30, on day 27 of the crossing, the boat’s desalinator, which converts seawater to drinking water, failed. When the team switched to a manual pump, that broke as well. Suddenly, the men were faced with an emergency: the only water left to drink was the 200 litres of bottled water they were carrying as ballast – nowhere near enough to get them to Barbados, around 1,000 miles away.

Talking to The Sunday Telegraph at the time via a satellite phone, Heritage employed his trademark understatement. “We’ve got no means of making water at the moment,” he said. “That’s not ideal.”

They had no choice but to ask the Aurora, a rescue yacht, to come to their aid. It meant they would be disqualified from the race (competitors must complete the distance without any external help) – but, as Heritage said, the mission was no longer to win the race but to reach Barbados alive.

The men had to adopt a “hard routine” – a military term for a regime to conserve rations. At first, they went down to 2.5 litres of water per person per day, and limited rowing to night-time and the cooler daylight hours. When they realised that the more they rowed, the longer it was going to take for the yacht to reach them – it was still 1,000 miles away – and the more their precious supplies of water would dwindle, they defied their competitive instincts and stopped rowing and dropped their power anchor (which stops a vessel in the middle of the sea). They killed time watching episodes of I’m Alan Partridge and The Thick of It, and playing Angry Birds on their iPods.

“We would have run out of water just before the boat arrived if we hadn’t put the power anchor down, and that’s not a great way to plan,” said Dixon. “If something had happened to the boat, we would have then been out of water or been down to a teaspoon of water, so we had to make the decision to stop. It goes against everything that’s natural to you in a race. As soon as we talked it out, the decision made itself.”

Unfortunately, it was a decision that had dire consequences. As the ocean current swirled around the stationary boat, pressure increased on the rudder. Just as the Aurora arrived with their water, it split in two.

This was Will Dixon’s darkest hour. “It was horrific,” he said, his brow furrowed again. “I imagined meeting my family in Barbados and them saying: 'Well done, we’re still proud of you, you’ve still done really well’, and it feeling very hollow to me.”

That night, no one slept much. “No one ever said, 'Oh my God, I’m falling apart here,’ ” says Janvrin. “We never spoke like that. It was always about solutions: who’s got an idea? Let’s work through it. Positive thinking. But privately, I had moments thinking this whole thing is going to pot.”

Calculating that they would reach the Caribbean in just seven or eight days, at 7pm last Tuesday, Rory Mackenzie spotted land.

“It was just a little speck on the horizon when I was on shift,” he said. “But after a sleep, I woke up and we were right by it. Amazing.”

No one will forget the scenes at Port St Charles on Wednesday when the rowers came in. Carl Anstey’s father, Chris, shook with tears as he hugged his son.

“I never imagined him getting this far. He’s fantastic,” he said.

After weeks of anxiety, that pride was an emotion shared by all the parents, siblings, wives and girlfriends as they watched their loved ones – bare-chested and trailing an amber flare – finally row into port.

Row2Recovery is aiming to raise £1 million for ABF: The Soldiers Charity, Help for Heroes and The Soldiers, Seamen, Airmen and Families Association. To donate, visitwww.row2recovery.com.Four crews are still making the crossing. To track their progress, visit www.taliskerwhiskyatlanticchallenge.com